XDA

Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Comparing Apples with Apples

There is this stupid graph out there called a must see by those on the left which graph is as dishonest as it is trivial. Here is a real comparison. If President Obama had cut Bush spending by the amount he raised it, he would be cruising to re-election. But like the scorpion in the fable, cutting spending is not in his nature. Therefore, we need a different president in 2012. Nearly anyone else would do.

Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Final Nail

I wrote recently about the recent recreation of the debunking experiment which showed, contrary to the scientific consensus regarding the so called green house gasses, that CO2 doesn't really trap heat in the laboratory like the discoverers of the green house gasses in the 19th Century said it would. I said that news was a hit, a palpable hit, on the Warmie alarmists.

Well, here's an Iowa class battleship 9 gun salvo on the Warmie cause. As measured by NASA satellites over the past decade plus, the atmosphere of our fair planet puts off far more heat, and at a sooner rate, than the Warmie climate models envision. Let's put that in clearer terms. The only thing that is was saying that we are facing catastrophic warming with a doubling of the CO2 from the pre-industrial 'ideal' of 280 ppm are climate models, which predict 2 to 6 degrees Celsius of additional warming just from CO2 levels approaching 500 ppm (not quite doubling) over the next 88 and 1/2 years. If the models don't accurately now show what is happening, that is, if they don't agree with the measured reality, the models are useless for the future, and there is nothing which causes us to believe in catastrophic global warming. NOTHING.

The models indeed suck and much more heat is escaping than any of them 'predict', thus, there is no warming currently as even Warmie high priests have grudgingly conceded. There was never enough warming from a mere doubling of CO2 possible to alarm the masses and cause them to go all Luddite and joyfully return to the happy, halcyon days of pre-industry. Even in Warmie theory, the most likely change a doubling of CO2 would have caused is a 1.38 degrees Celsius of warming. (See chart). So the Warmies invented a positive feedback mechanism of additional humidity and warming cirrus clouds which would take that 1.38 degrees and multiply it by 1.2 to 4 times. The trouble for the Warmies is that there is no positive feedback mechanism and their models, which depended on it, are bunk.There may not be a whole lot more to write about on this subject. I'll have to start seeing many more movies.

UPDATE: At Real Climate and other sites, the Warmie Empire begins to strike back and calls the study which is causing all the headlines flawed. One climate model kinda sucked, they say, but other ones are pretty good. Listen, they tweak the computer climate models to get as close to reality as possible as reality rears its ugly head in satellite measurements. But no matter how well the tweaking goes, the computer models are not evidence of global warming--the measurement is. I think the measurement is a little suspect due to poor sightings of the instruments and the loss of a lot of high latitude stations in the past two decades or so, but it's probably warmed a bit in fits and starts over the past 120 years. There is no doubt that we are taking the sequestered CO2 in fossil fuels and injecting it into the atmosphere at a rapid rate so that some of the recent warming is human caused. The good news is the asymptotic reaction to doubling the CO2. (See graph). Most of the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere was present at the mythical pre-industrial level of 280 and when we get to double that, in the 22nd Century, the effect will be very much the same as what happened in the 2oth Century, a gentle 1 degree rise. The growing seasons in Canada and Siberia become longer. Difficult to get people to sacrifice life as we know it, or sacrifice at all, based just on that; and the people and governments of about a third of the world, in India and China, say there is no way they are giving up industrialization. Whatever the science shows in the next decade or so, the tipping point alarmist moment--we have to do something radical now to save the planet--has passed. The Warmie alarmists failed. Utterly.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Amy Weinhouse--What a Tremendous Waste

Rehab? Over my dead body. It's a deal, said the Devil. Although she was probably not in the same class* as Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, and Cobain, 27 was again the magic number. What's up with that?

*She probably did not have those guys' success. I don't doubt she had a similar level of talent. Surely she was as talented as Robert Johnson, Pigpen, Pete Ham, and Brian Jones, also all dead at age 27. Seriously, what's up with that?

Shoulder Surgery

I can't now remember how I first hurt my shoulder, but I'm now sure I tore my right shoulder rotator cuff whatever I did. My orthopedic specialist gave me a miracle shot of marcain and steroids and I did some physical therapy and things seemed better--at least it didn't keep me awake at night. Then I broke a stout green branch in the air in front of me with two hands to put into the trash a few years ago. That was a mistake, but I recovered soon and was learning to cope when just before Christmas last I fell on the ice. I went back to the orthopedic surgeon. I got an MRI and the results were alarming, at least to her. Then I noticed how I was compensating a lot when lifting and the eventual up-shot was that I had arthroscopic surgery yesterday that I think went OK.

There are four muscles that make up the rotator cuff and keep the top of the humorous bone, the ball, in the socket. Most of the pain from a tear in one or more of the muscles comes from impingement, when the ball rides up in the socket and pinches muscle and tendons against the acromium. To repair things, the doctors put screws, with sutures attached at the head, in the ball and then pull over the retracted remnants of the torn muscles and tendons and tie them down. The success of the surgery depends a lot on the pliancy of the remnants and the 'quality' of the tissue-- will it hold down and reattach. Apparently my torn muscles were good and I have a good chance of a near full recovery. Yeah.

I made the mistake of agreeing to a brachial plexus nerve block which numbed and paralyzed my whole arm for most of the day. Touching a warm Zombie arm is an unpleasant thing, made even creepier by the sense that it is not your arm and is your arm both at the same time. I had a general anesthetic as well, but this time the last two seconds before coming to were not as supremely pleasant as in the past. The last times were so good, it's what you hope to feel in the presence of God. The good thing about the block was that there was no pain while it lasted and now that it's worn off, even with low grade narcotics, I'm in pain, maybe a four out of ten.

You have to wear a sling, all the time, even in bed, so sleep was hard to come by last night. Not that I'm complaining; I think things will get better as time goes by.

Thought of the Day

It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street — and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more — and nobody’s downgrading them.

Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional.

The second paragraph is the truism the left seems unwilling or unable to grasp. I have enough faith in my fellow likely voters that a large majority of them get it and a palpably petulant President Obama is not convincing enough of them that it's the evil troglodyte right that is screwing everything up. NY 26 is a little troubling though.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

The Hits Just Keep Coming

1. The whole theory that CO2 lets whole light in but "traps" rebounding infrared light (heat) from the surface and causes the trapped heat to go back down, keeping us snug and warm, comes from 19th Century scientists, Fourier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius. However, there was a turn of the last century experiment by Professor Robert W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University (in 1909) which said the heat created or retained by the so-called greenhouse gasses was nothing and the added heat the scientists found was solely from a lack of convection. Well, a scientist recently redid the experiment and it's pretty much true. The CO2 scatters the infrared rather than blocks or traps it for temperature gain. The only thing causing more heat in the experiment is the barrier keeping the heat from dissipating through convection, just like a real green house. Thus, the skeptics are attacking the Warmie theory at the core and, on first reports, winning.

2. The second is the cosmic ray cloud theory which was greeted by the world when it was first put out as so much lunacy. The theory goes: greater magnetic energy from the sun creates a magnetic shield that covers the inner planets (of which we are the third) and protects them from cosmic rays. Cosmic rays cause clouds to form in our atmosphere (just like they do in cloud chambers) which clouds cool the planet through shade and rain. So decreased magnetic activity from the sun (and there is no doubtthat's happening) allows more cosmic rays to hit our atmosphere and we get more clouds and it's cooler here on Earth. Just as the theory of floating continents went from dead wrong to dead right during the 60s, it's possible that the cosmic ray cloud theory will rapidly become like dogma and the Warmies will have suffered another hit, a palpable hit.

It's just possible that CO2 doesn't really do anything much but feed the plants and it's the sun cycles and water vapor 'green house effect' which drives the climate cycles here. Just possible.

If those are true, then the sea level must be rising. An expanding water volume with more water pouring into it cannot do otherwise.

But the sea level is not rising. It's falling. There is no doubt about that, the three satellite measurements of sea level currently active all agree. Our governmental agency (at nearby CU) tasked with measuring the sea level says it's fallen lately. I know it's just a short time, but it should never go down if the ocean is heating and the land ice is melting in either the northern or southern hemisphere.

There is a physical limit to the amount of water that can exist in the atmosphere (either as clouds or as humidity) which limit depends on air pressure and air temperature; but unless several laws regarding water vapor in gas have been suspended, the explanation for falling sea levels is not that the water has evaporated out of the sea into the atmosphere.

So someone is lying to us about one or more of the above three things. I have my suspicions but I'll wait for more information before I comment further.

Standing on Principles is Popular

And playing politics with the Nation's economy in dire straits is unpopular. Who knew? Speaker Boehner has shown some backbone and not given in to the Democratic demands, insanely, to raise taxes on job creators during a particularly limp time of the very slow and weak recovery of the economy. As I looked onthe Real Clear Politics poll averages, I noticed that the president's approval numbers ticked down and the generic Republican popularity ticked up. Mere coincidence?

Diomedes, who used to write here, is in a funk because he thinks we'll get killed in 2012 in the Senate and House elections because we'll be punished for even talking about cutting entitlement spending like social security and medicare. I have a little more faith in my fellow citizens who know that you can't spend more than you take in forever.

Don't Look Now

Since the advent of commercial satellites in the late 70s, we have opened up new vistas for science. We can see and measure the extent of the sea ice in the Arctic and around Antarctica, for example, as well as have a comprehensive, untainted by poor siting, record of global temperatures from which an average can be computed. The fly in the ointment is that the record is very, very short. We do not know if what has been happening over the past 30 to 40 years is unprecedented and scary or merely part of a longer term, sine wave like, natural variability. That said, it looks like the Arctic might have a huge 2007 like sea ice melt off this summer--as bad or worse than 2007, which will fuel the Warmie doomsayers' efforts to destroy our economy for years to come. In 2007, the sea ice of the Northern Ocean didn't melt in place; winds and currents broke it up and sent it south down along the coast of Greenland to where it melted in warmer seas out of the Arctic circle. I can't seem to find out if that is happening now, but, despite this ignorance, I'm predicting the AMSR-E sea ice extent on September 20, 2011 will be just above 2007 but below last year's, right around 4.92 million square kilometers.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Fair Share

President Obama has talked for a long time about fairness and taxes. Here is an excerpt from a pretty bad speechhe gave a few months ago.

As a country that values fairness, wealthier individuals have traditionally born a greater share of this burden than the middle class or those less fortunate. This is not because we begrudge those who’ve done well – we rightly celebrate their success. Rather, it is a basic reflection of our belief that those who have benefitted most from our way of life can afford to give a bit more back.

He obviously doesn't think the "rich" are paying their fair share of income taxes because he constantly talks about raising tax rates on the rich revenue from taxing the rich more.

Let's see if he's right about the rich not paying their fair share. Let's look at the brackets.

It would be fair to pay the exact same percent of taxes as your percent of income received.Is there any other way to call it fair? If the top 1% earns 30% of the nation's income, they should pay 30% of the income taxes. Likewise if the bottom 50% earn 10% of the income in the nation, they should pay 10% of the income taxes.

How does that concept stack up to reality? Not so good, according to IRS analysis of 2010 income taxes. The rich don't pay their fair share; they pay way more. The top 1% (above $380,000/yr) paid 38% of the income taxes paid but only earned 20% of the income in America. It's similar with the top 5%, who paid 58.7% of the income taxes but only earned 34.7% of the nation's income. The top 10% ( at or above $113,800/yr) paid nearly 70% of the income taxes but only took in 45.8% of the income. The bottom 50% take in 12.7% of the income in America but only paid 2.7% of the income taxes. What's fair about that? There is only one solution. Tax the poor more and make them pay their fair share.

Just kidding. There is nothing more fair than a flat tax. Even formerly commie Russia now has a flat tax. Everyone pays 15% of income, with few deductions. That's fair, as I've written before.

Graph of the Week

This is really horrible. Cut federal spending; cut the budget (if we had a budget to cut). We need to get rid of DEA, FNMA, FHMC, Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Health and Human Resources, Housing and Urban Development, Labor and the Interior. Downsize everything else but the military. Do the inevitable with Social Security, which is raise the retirement age several years and means test. Stop this madness before things really go bad, like in the Wiemar.

Saturday, July 09, 2011

Seeing the Light

Prediction is very hard, especially about the future. Niels Bohr (and Yogi Berra)

In an otherwise fairly pedestrian story about how the British weather predictors (the Met Office) are trying to improve their abilities to see even a day into England's weather future, comes this bombshell (at least it's a bombshell to those who dabble in the Global Warming controversy):

...scientists at the Met Office and elsewhere are beginning to understand the effect of the 11-year solar cycle on climate. When sunspots and other solar activity are at a minimum, the effect is similar to that of El Niño: more easterly winds and cold winter weather for Britain.

“We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year,” says Scaife. With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.

Wow. Just wow. This is Denier stuff. It is a Warmie article of faith that CO2 is the prime mover of climate; to even hint that natural variability could override the effect of man made CO2 is heretical. To say that a natural cycle in the sun could cause warming or cooling on our planet is, to the Denier viewpoint, merely stepping onto the broad, sunlit uplands of rational thinking. It's blasphemy to the likes of Al Gore and James Hansen.

Notice, however, how Mr. Scaife clings to the dogma when he says we could have "icy winters ahead, despite global warming." A more neutral way to put that would have been: we could have "icy winters ahead, instead of global warming."

Sunday, July 03, 2011

Friday Night Movie Review--TrollHunter

Went with son Andrew to Norway's version of The Blair Witch Project called TrollHunter and it was a hoot. It probably helps to know some folktales about trolls, but it's not necessary. The director, André Øvredal, has only done one movie previously, Future Murder, ten years ago, but I've never even heard of it. He does an excellent job here though. His switching between subtle and outrageous is seamless.

There's no need to go into the details of the story as it is all right there in the title. The titular lead is played by anti-American Otto Jespersen, OJ, unfortunately, to his fans. I have to say he is the glue that holds this thing together. My favorite is the bridge scene and his matter of fact resoluteness there was hilarious. There is a plot, but it's not the point of the film.

It won't be for everyone, but with all the very disappointing scifi and fantasy films out now, this is a breath of fresh air which restores one's belief in the cleverness and skill displayed in ostensibly independent films. It's at the Mayan. Go today.

Saturday, July 02, 2011

Thought of the Day

Aside from the repressiveness of the policies themselves, there are three highly significant and enduring harms from Obama's behavior [continuing core Bush terrorism policies]. First, it creates the impression that Republicans were right all along in the Bush-era War on Terror debates and Democratic critics were wrong. The same theme is constantly sounded by conservatives who point out Obama's continuation of these policies: that he criticized those policies as a candidate out of ignorance and partisan advantage, but once he became President, he realized they were right as a result of accessing the relevant classified information and needing to keep the country safe from the Terrorist threat.

[...]

Second, Obama has single-handedly eliminated virtually all mainstream debate over these War on Terror policies.... What was once viewed as the signature of Bush/Cheney radicalism is now official, bipartisan Washington consensus: the policies equally of both parties and all Serious people. Thanks to Barack Obama, this architecture is firmly embedded in place and invulnerable to meaningful political challenge.

Third, Obama's embrace of these policies has completely rehabilitated the reputations and standing of the Bush officials responsible for them.